Two of the Three

We left Sophie and Mack at the house in Aroona on a morning that was already too warm. Torrin had been in Japan since November. Two of the three, standing in the driveway beside a bus that had spent its final months of build parked out front, watching us pull away from the last place we had all lived together. Twenty-two months, that bus had taken. Started on the street in Wurtulla and finished here, every panel and shelf fitted by hand. Now it was done, and so were we, and the moment of actually going felt nothing like the moment we had imagined.

Sal held them both. Anth did the same, then stood a second too long beside the driver's door. There is a silence that falls over a goodbye when everyone has agreed it is the right thing and no one quite believes it yet. We drove into that silence and carried it north.

Grammy's place was an hour and a half up the highway, near Gympie. We arrived in the thick of a Queensland January afternoon, the kind of heat that sits on your shoulders the moment you step off the bus. Grammy met us the way she meets everything: already moving, already useful. Her sewing machine was out before we had finished parking, and within the hour she was stitching improvements to things we had not realised needed improving. She had spent enough of her own life on the road to know what matters on a long trip and what does not, and she applied that knowledge with quiet authority.

Three nights we stayed. The jobs were real: small fixes, adjustments, the kind of tasks that multiply the closer you get to leaving. Grammy helped with what she could and watched us fuss over the rest with patience that said she had seen this before. Each evening the three of us sat with the day cooling around us and talked about what lay ahead. Tasmania, eventually. The plan was loose, but Grammy had already promised to join us there, and promises from Grammy carried weight.

On the morning we left, the goodbye was lighter than the one at Aroona. Grammy would come. She had said so, and she was not the sort of person who said things she did not mean. Still, pulling away carried its own ache. She stood and watched the bus go, and we watched her shrink in the mirrors, and for a few minutes neither of us said much.

The highway opened up. Behind us were the children, the house, Grammy's kitchen, the driveway where the bus had found its finished shape. Ahead was country we had studied on maps for months, arriving now through the windscreen in real colour and real heat. The Coaster's diesel settled into its rhythm. Sal said something small at some point in that first stretch, the kind of remark that does not survive in memory because it was not the words that mattered. The quiet between them had been the thinking kind, not the worried kind, and her voice broke it gently.

We were on the road. Not driving to Grammy's, not running errands, not testing a route. On the road, properly, with everything we owned behind us and nothing fixed ahead except a vague southward pull and a promise to call the kids.Read more